Welcome to the PAKAM Network

PAKAM is an association of Indigenous media producers and broadcasters in the Pilbara and Kimberley regions of Western Australia. We provide ongoing support to 12 Remote Indigenous Broadcasting Services (RIBS), and other community broadcast stations in the region, including 8 larger town-based community radio stations.

Our support includes training, licensing, local production and broadcast operations, distribution and marketing, new technologies, equipment purchase and installation, funding, technical repair and maintenance of production and community licensed services’ transmission equipment.

The PAKAM Radio Network provides a VAST satellite-delivered regional service (Channel 917) from the network hub in Broome. This service enables the sharing of news, information, special broadcast events, music and stories by all the indigenous radio stations in the region and is retransmitted full time in 18 remote communities, scattered over a million square kilometres, with an audience in excess of 5,000.

She said it was common for children in their program to come from highly traumatic situations.

"What we do know is that when parents are impacted by trauma like domestic violence or alcohol, or any of those things, it does impact on the children's development and therefore we need to target the children and the parents in our interventions," she said.

Ms Schulz-Allen said early intervention was vital to ensure future success in mainstream education.

"What we do know from research is that between zero and five the brain development is most rapid and therefore we need to target children in that age group to allow them to be ready for school and for learning later on in life," she said.

"We measure children on several domains of their development like fine motor development, gross motor development, speech, receptive language, expressive language.

"All of those things and what we've measured is that all children in our program actually show a big improvement but mainly the language domain which allows them to progress in school." ... See MoreSee Less